I am told the only way to get ahead in Steemit is to follow other users with high SP (Whales) and to vote for every piece of content they publish. Also, whenever my friends publish new content I am expected to vote for it straight away as part of the mutual benefits of helping each other to earn. It doesn't matter what the content is or even if there is any quality within that content, I just need to vote for it.

Yeah... that doesn't work lol. I've been only upvoting things I value as per content I want to support. Effort matters, as it's work done, at least it matters to me, as well as the quality of the information being presented. Things are quite wacked out from regular reality here. It's a gamble at getting paid by others caring to upvote you. So many people aren't bloggers, and they don't want Steem to be a blogging platform (even many rich, as they just want quantity of ppl to come so that STEEM can go up in $$$), even though that's how it started.